Windows Phone 8 Rooms feature

Windows Phone 8 brings with it many improvements to its social abilities, one such improvement is the inclusion of “Rooms”.

Taking some of the ideas from Windows Phone 7’s Groups feature and expanding it out, the new feature allows for powerful social interaction with a selection of your contacts. Windows Phone has always been a powerful performer with regards to its social networking prowess and Rooms is going to take that a step further.

Groups will still exist in Windows Phone 8 and are improved but Rooms will now reside in the new section of the People hub called “Together”. This is where you can create a room and invite people to join your new social circle. These are the features available to the group you create:

Room Chat Unlike with group texting, every Room member in a Room Chat session sees each other’s messages and replies, making it easy to keep everyone in-the-loop—and only Room members can see those messages. And with the new Location Sharing feature you can just as easily let everyone else in a Room know exactly where they are.

Shared Calendar Every Room has a shared calendar, which all Room members can view and update. If anyone adds an event or makes a change, it is automatically synced to all other Room members’ phones.

Shared Photo Album Rooms also provide a shared photo and video album—just share a photo or video with a Room and it’ll be visible to all Room members.

Shared Notes Rooms also make it easy to share OneNote notes, which are automatically synced across all Room members’ phones.

The new rooms feature will also work properly with Windows Phone 7 and Apple iOS devices as regards to shared calendars.

This looks to be an excellent addition to Windows Phone’s social credentials and we can see tons of potential for creating work, family and friend specific rooms.

I believe they said that the only piece missing for iPhone and Android is the CHAT piece. Certainly nice to have, though. Microsoft could keep exclusivity by only allowing iPhone and Android to JOIN existing Rooms, but not CREATE them. That way, the iPhone and Android folks get a taste of the powerful group productivity functionality and that alone may sway them to join Windows Phone. I think this one got watered down due to a lot of the other features that were discussed. This is really a KILLER feature that expands upon the great BBM from Blackberry. This feature alone needs to be front-and-Center on TV Ads... like right now!